By Erasing His Present, Kyler Murray Opens Up the Future

The Pro Bowler’s social media scrub provided a reminder that quarterbacks aren't always attached to their teams—or even football.

Kyler Murray’s social media scrubbing on Monday could amount to something, or it could amount to nothing. Some of us grew up in the age of the AOL Away Message and, let’s be honest, when something was on our minds, we weren’t exactly presenting a sober and accurate assessment of the situation on that little yellow digital notepad. A few Linkin Park lyrics later and the person on the other end of the monitor didn’t know how upset we were, or about what. 

Cleaning out a social media account is sort of the modern version of our old online temper tantrums, though high level athletes have perfected it to an art form. Deleting all evidence of an employer, spouse or, in this case, team, is about three levels above “accidentally” liking a post critical of the G.M. It’s one level below posting screw this, I’m out of here. Minus a preemptive announcement that you’re undergoing some page maintenance, there is no way to believe something is not happening.

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The added intrigue of Murray and the difference between him and another person trying to Tweet their way out of town is, obviously, his recent history as a dual-sport athlete. Absent any knowledge of some other issue, one could surmise it’s about an MVP caliber player gearing up for a brutal contract negotiation. Murray just finished the third year of his rookie contract and, if he’d hit the open market, would likely earn a salary commensurate with Dak Prescott and Josh Allen. Any suggestion from the Cardinals otherwise could—and should—trigger immense backlash.

Or, it’s about a player who was so good at baseball that he was the first athlete to ever be selected in the first round of both the NFL and MLB draft (No. 9 overall by the Oakland Athletics). Maybe that player is thinking about going back (his Twitter picture was changed to a dual shot of him throwing in his Oklahoma uniform and him hitting a baseball in an Athletics jersey).

Regardless of the answer, Murray’s baseball past makes this a development worth watching with a broader perspective.

If he’s thinking of returning to another sport, it would represent a seismic, Andrew Luck-ian shift to the NFL landscape and would further eradicate the idea that franchise quarterbacks are like stone masonry you can just plant on the front lawn and expect to be there for two decades. Murray was on a breakneck pace for most of the 2021 season and had the Cardinals comfortably resting as the best team in football before a late-season collapse.

If he left for the daily grind of baseball, for half-empty stadiums, sometimes meaningless Octobers (the Athletics missed the playoffs this year but made it each of the previous three seasons), it could energize a sport that has long accepted its role as a bygone pastime. It could damage an NFL flirting with a top-heavy quarterbacking landscape.

If he simply used baseball as a fulcrum to inch his way over certain contractual hurdles, it would also represent a noteworthy, but not altogether unfamiliar moment. Last year, we were entranced by the idea of Aaron Rodgers walking away from professional football to host a game show. While that seems like a lifetime ago, we sat around calculating potential lost wages and the massive difference in work time.

The thing about contract standoffs is that, when leaked through the proper surrogates, power brokers can make us believe just about anything. Was Rodgers really going to leave to host Jeopardy!? Was Rodgers even an actual finalist to host Jeopardy? What really happened to LeVar Burton?

We’re getting ahead of ourselves, obviously, but Murray using a football vs. baseball argument at this point in the game’s history would force a lot of us to re-confront the on-field violence we witness on a regular basis and wonder, if given an actual choice, how many players would pick the relative long-term stability of baseball over the potential vacillations of a football career. Sunday after Sunday, we become acclimated to the site of a player on a stretcher being wheeled out on the stadium and, like pavlovian dogs, exit our recliner at the sound of the morose Fox injury jingle no closer to considering the calamity we witness on each play. Would having a second No. 1 overall pick at the most important position in football leave over the span of seven years mean anything to us?

If he left and it wasn’t about the heightened potential for injury, or stability, how would that help undercut the painfully ridiculous seriousness with which we treat the NFL?

As we mentioned before, this could also be nothing. Who hasn’t gone through an Instagram deep clean to sweep away some cobwebs? Unfortunately for Murray, he’s far too interesting and talented to get that benefit of the doubt, unlike most of us trying to craft the perfectly passive-aggressive Facebook status on our neighborhood happenings page. It would seem it’s up to the Cardinals to respond now, if they’re not already blocked.